Web design, free web templates, articles and more.

Colour resources for web design

suz — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:10:45 +0000

ColorCombos.com

colourlovers.com

ColorToy 2.0, a color scheme generator

colorbe.com

Colour palette generator based on an image you upload

Colordb the colour database

4096 color wheel

Colorhunter.com - Create and find color palettes made from images

Color scheme generator2 - Has a nifty feature of previewing a colour through the eyes of people with certain color blindness conditions.

colorjack.com

Colors on the Web - The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors.

colorschemer.com

Colormixers.com - A nice app to mix up your own colours

colorblender.com - Much like the above but with a few differences.

kuler.adobe.com - Some beautiful palettes can be found and downloaded here.

colr.org

pic2color.com - Create color palettes, recolor your pictures and more.

krazydad.com/colrpickr - Find Flickr photos by colour

Graphic Designer Spotlight - Beyond Creative

suz — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:34:28 +0000

The company
Beyond Creative is a graphics design studio based in NSW, Australia.

Services
Beyond Creative specialize in helping brands gain a strong visual message and a competitive advantage across different media.

From the CEO:
Yes, we love good design, but we’re not just a pretty typeface.
All our work is carefully crafted to deliver a precise message to an exact target market in a memorable way. We work with a talented team of local copywriters, photographers, web site builders and printers so we can provide all the services you need without the agency overheads.

Review
Beyond Creative’s services include logo design, brochures, advertisements, annual reports, signage, website design and basically any type of web and graphics design service you could wish for. You can see their collection of past logo designs here and other parts of their portfolio here. Currently they are also offering their 2009 family calendars which can be used for fundraising at over 70% profit.

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Top 5 free Wordpress themes for October

suz — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:49:15 +0000

Negatendo by JungleJar

Cellar Heat from SmashingMagazine

Magazine style theme Pemuda (This is a lite version which is free)

Ecolution Warrior from Theme Warrior

Mahinhin by Padd Solutions

Firefox extensions for webmasters

suz — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:07:09 +0000

When creating or running a website, Firefox combined with some good extensions can be a great time saver. Below is a list of some Firefox extensions that are particularly useful for the webmaster.

FireShot - Take better screenshots of a page in it’s entirety, not just the parts visible on the screen.

Google Cache Checker - Tells you automatically whether a page you are visiting is cached by Google or not.

Adsense Notifier - This saves you from having to constantly login to your Adsense account to check your stats. Instaead you can just glance at the status bar in Firefox and instantly know your earnings for the day.

IE View Lite - Provides a context menu item for opening the current page in IE. Very handy when designing a page and checking to see if it looks good in both browsers.

Search Status - Extensive search-related information about visited web sites, including Google PageRank, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, and backward links from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Web directory form filler - Makes the job of submitting your site’s information to web directories easier.

The items on the above list come from Gadget Advisor’s best extensions for Firefox article. Visit Gadget Advisor for more useful articles such as their recommended best Windows software and Blaze Media Pro review

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Designing your website with Office Live

suz — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:11:30 +0000

Here is a bit of an in depth look at how to create your web site with Microsoft® Office Live, a free, browser based site design tool .

Step 1.
After signing up you will be presented with this screen (this is somewhat cropped to only show the parts I want to show at the moment):

I have circled the link you need to click to get started with the design process.

At this point make sure you are not blocking poups because the design tool is in a popup window.

Step 2.
Next you will be presented with a design:

The options you have are:
1) You can upload a logo to go above the header. You have the choice of displaying the Windows Live search box above your header also.
2) The top corner image can be replaced with another 5 choices.
3) The header can have different positioning. For example the above image I mentioned can be placed on the left, right or middle, chosen from a number of presets.
4) “Welcome” and slogan can be customized and also moved around.
5) You can change the colour theme, choosing from 30+ predefined palettes as shown below.

7) Navigation can be moved to run along the top, the left only, or both the top or left.

These were the options in the “Site Designer” mode.
Next we switch to the “Page Editor” mode which gives us further options.

Step 3
In “Site designer” mode, you have the option of changing your content and it’s layout, adding images, hyperlinks, etc. You have “zones” to work with, each one individually editable and movable to be either next to eachother or under eachother. You can have one, two or three zones.

There is a list of “Modules” which include Calendar, “Contact us”, Slideshow, “Map and directions” etc. These are ready made widgets which you can add to your Zones. They can be done manually also but using these modules is very user friendly.

You can add a new page to your site by clicking on the “web pages” menu which brings up a list of predefined template pages you can choose from.

Here is the end result of my creation:

Overall my impression was that Office Live is very user friendly. It does a good job for those who need to get a simple business site on the web fast without having to spend any money or time learning HTML.

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Links this week

suz — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:08:15 +0000

Thanks to all the wonderful people who linked to this blog this week:
Aainaa for mentioning this blog in her Top 10 themes article.
SproutBuilder said hello to us on their blog
and Hongkiat in their article “60 High Quality Free Web Templates”
Thanks all! If you use Twitter don’t forget to say hello on my Twitter page.

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17 browser-based free online website creators

suz — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:57:04 +0000

Browser based editors that allow you to create a web site for free and without needing much (or any really) design or HTML knowledge.

Wix - A Flash widget and page creator.
Weebly - Create multipage websites using a drag and drop Ajax interface. Users can then save those websites to a Weebly server or download them for use elsewhere.
Synthasite - An Ajax based drag and drop webpage editor.
Microsoft® Office Live, a free, browser based site design tool with optional free domain name and hosting.
Google Pages - Ajax based simple WYSIWYG web editor.
Sprout - A browser-based tool for creating interactive widgets and web sites in Flash
Jimdo - Another easy to use AJAX site editor. Has a feature for copying other sites’ designs.
Sampa, Babyjellybeans and MyFamily.com - All family oriented, create a personal website, family website or baby website.
Letseat.at - Create a free web site for your restaurant.
SnapPages - Drag and drop text boxes, widgets, photos, calendars and more with an easy to use web page builder.
Pagii - Aims to craft highly stylized personal web pages with drag and drop resizeable widgets. Has social network qualities.
Edicy - An elegant and simple solution to creating web sites.
Sauropol - Create blogs, text pages, image galleries, news lists, document folders, bulletin boards and more.
DoodleKit - Some of these features are available for free, but many will require that you pay
SiteKreator - The free version is a little limited with only 5 design choices.

Halloween graphics roundup

suz — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 05:26:59 +0000

Avatrs.nnm.ru has a great collection of Halloween icons and images.

Halloween web templates at TemplateKingdom

Halloween tombstone set by SeiyaStock

Free vectors at Freevectors.net

Pumpkin patch by Solitairmiles: Some beautiful photo manipulation for Halloween

More
*Halloweenjoys.com has Myspace, Friendster and other social networking profile Halloween layouts.
*Smashing Magazines’s roundup of Halloween wallpapers, icons and Art
*Halloween vector set by DragonArtz
*Download some free Halloween templates at afreewebtemplate.com

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Feng-GUI - Feng Shui for graphic user interfaces

suz — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:45:27 +0000

Feng Gui is a useful free service to which you can upload a screenshot of your web site for a computer generated analysis of where human eyes are most likely to look within the first 5 seconds of arriving on the site. This is very useful if you need to make sure your products are visible and don’t just fade into the background.

Visit them at: http://www.feng-gui.com/

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New Wordpress theme release - DailyPress

suz — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:38:56 +0000

DailyPress is a new free Wordpress theme released by BlogOhBlog. It features a very clean and functional 3 column design with space for 125×125 ads which are controlled through a separate file.
The Demo can be found here and you can download the theme by visiting BlogOhBlog